The Frozen Water Trade

Follow your Vision, but tell your Story first

How Storytelling can teach us both, following our vision and inspire people to follow us

One of the most common questions we are discussing in my Strategy Coachings and Mentoring Groups is this:

How can I create something unique while being new to business building?

The difficulty behind this question is that we tend to study all the knowledge, tips and techniques that belong to starting and growing an online-business.

We are afraid of failure and want to figure out a foolproof recipe, so whatever we invest in will be successful right away.

That makes uns forget what made us start the business in the first place.

Reading Stories reminds us of our vision and that it might be worth following our intuition. In life, but also in business.

Today, I had to move some books from my attick studio because my husband is afraid that the shelf is getting too heavy (historian that I am). A book came to my hands that has always fascinated me: The Frozen Water Trade.

It is about a completely new idea for a business, that initially sounded to crazy to be even near to realistic — and turned into a world wide fortune that also had a ripple effect.

The idea: harvest ice in Massachusetts and sell it to people in the tropics. The nineteenth-century entrepreneur Frederic Tudor was immune to ridicule and single-minded in his conviction that the ice trade could be profitable. He was right.

On February 13, 1806, the brig Favorite left Boston harbor bound for the Caribbean island of Martinique with a cargo that few imagined would survive the month-long voyage. Packed in hay in the hold were large chunks of ice cut from a frozen Massachusetts lake. This was the first venture of a young Boston entrepreneur, Frederic Tudor, who believed he could make a fortune selling ice to people in the tropics.

Ridiculed at the outset, Tudor endured years of hardship before he was to fulfill his dream. Over the years, the frozen-water trade was extended to Havana, Charleston, New Orleans, London, and finally to Calcutta, where in 1833 more than one hundred tons of ice survived a four-month journey of 16,000 miles with two crossings of the equator.

In 1883, Mark Twain described in Life on the Mississippi how manufactured ice was replacing natural ice near New Orleans. His description is a picture of decadence: The blocks were "crystal clear, within their icy depths big bouquets of fresh, brilliant tropical flowers." The ice sat on tables "to cool the tropical air; and also to be ornamental, for the flowers imprisoned in them could be seen as though through plate-glass'." But the luxury was now within reach of the masses. Twain compared the ice to jewelry previously available only to the rich but now worn by everybody. Ice had become commonplace.

Trying to compete with the Imported Frozen Water and meet the growing demand for cold beverages and food, inventions of refrigerators and ice machines were initiated. The Frozen Water Trade is a fascinating account of the birth of an industry that — after importing already coffee, sugar, chocolat and other non temperature-sensitive exotic products — finally changed our whole food palette in Europe.

This stunning endeavour of the Frozen Water Trade shows how the combination of a somewhat crazy idea and focused marketing to create a demand — Tudor trained bartenders to use ice in cocktails in order to illustrate the virtues of cold drinks — created a whole new industry.

Inspired by Tudor’s success, it wasn’t long before other entrepreneurs went on to find other ways of keeping things artificially cold.

This time, however, they knew that the demand (in the form of housewives wanting to keep their food fresh as long as possible) was there from the start.

Tudor would be stunned at where his ambition has led, and probably find it pretty cool.

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The Frozen Water Trade reminds me that an initial crazy idea can be the first step into your business.

And sometimes it triggers a demand that is already there. So your only job is to provide the solution.

It also teaches us that if you have an idea, it is mostly “only” a rare combination of two things. Everything else is already there.

Remember that it is your job as an entrepreneur to bring your idea to life, and give your own spice, personality, network and extra effort into the marketing.

Everything else is testing, research and searching for simple solutions.

Imagine a hot summer day — how would it be to enjoy a cool drink?

What is your crystal clear icy idea that would refresh us on a hot summer day?